I attended my first session of life drawing as the newest member of Chertsey Artists art club last night.

There is nothing quite like working from life, be it plein air painting and sketching, still life in the studio or working from a life model. Working from life makes an artist work to convert a three-dimensional scene into a two-dimensional representation. Working from photos (nothing wrong with that, I do it) means the artist is working from a two-dimensional representation and converting it to another two-dimensional representation in a new medium.

Life drawing from a nude model is maybe the hardest object to capture successfully. We human beings are so familiar with what other human beings look like that when a drawing or painting of a model is not right it’s obvious. What is not always obvious is why it’s not right! That’s the challenge.

Now that I’ve joined Chertsey Artists and have access locally to life drawing sessions I will be attending as often as I can. The hope and aim is to improve my life drawing skills which will benefit my painting and drawing of all subjects.

I’ll blog about my experience and post pictures here and on my usual social media sites, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Thanks for reading!